Mapping the ‘In-Between’

Abstract

In the opening chapter of the book, I use Paul Ricoeur’s classic text, Universal Civilization and Natural Culture (1965) as a point of departure. The text intends to show how developing countries, including Iran, confront a twofold problem: the necessity of understanding the country’s profound personality and rootedness in the soil of the past, at one extreme, and at the other, the scientific, technical and cultural rationality of modern civilization. In other words, these countries face the crucial challenge of becoming modern and yet returning to their original sources, or of simultaneously reviving an old, dormant civilization while also taking part in universal civilization. In the first chapter, I argue that the general history of Iran over the last 150 years, and particularly its architectural and urban transformation, has oscillated between the two extremes of the West, Modernization and Modernity (Tajaddod) on the one hand, and the East, Nationalism and Tradition (Sonnat) on the other.